Jon Stewart Takes On Peggy Noonan Over IRS Scandal

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Jon Stewart said the Obama Administration has been standing “crotch deep in the scandal swamp.”

Updated at 12:48 AM EDT on Friday, May 24, 2013

As you know — unless you’ve been living in a survivalist bunker, in which case you may want to stop reading this — the IRS has recently admitted to subjecting tea party groups to special scrutiny.

In fact, for the past few weeks, the Obama Administration has been standing “crotch deep in the scandal swamp,” said Jon Stewart on Wednesday’s “Daily Show.”

Sure, we’ve had our fun with the scandals, Stewart said, but some folks shouldn’t have been invited to the party. And that brings us to the latest installment of the "Daily Show" segment called “Hey, Let’s All Pile on the President … Not so Fast, You.”

Peggy Noonan, of The Wall Street Journal, recently said that the scandals “make a cluster that implies very bad things.” The IRS scandal in particular, she said, was something “I have never seen in my lifetime.”

“What if,” said Stewart, “a president secretly sold weapons to Iran in return for American hostages and used the proceeds to illegally fund a bunch of coked-up jungle rapists in Nicaragua. Ring a bell?” That’s the Iran-Contra scandal, of course, which exploded during President Ronald Reagan's administration.

And the scandal should ring a bell, seeing as how Peggy Noonan worked as a high-level speechwriter for President Reagan. Was he in any way responsible? According to a 2001 interview with Noonan, “Reagan had bad luck in Iran-Contra.” In another interview she called Iran-Contra a “mistake.”

And what about President Obama? Noonan says it doesn’t matter if Obama didn’t know about the wrongdoing at the IRS: he’s the president and should be held accountable. And what about Reagan? As Noonan wrote in her hagiography about Reagan, “The men around Reagan … failed.”